The Strange See-Saw Of The PewDiePie-T Series YouTube Tussle

In October 2018, Jimmy ‘Mr. Beast’ Donaldson bought space on every billboard in his town to promote the Youtube star PewDiePie, asking people to subscribe to PewDiePie’s YouTube channel and unsubscribe from the YouTube channel of the Indian music record label and film production company, T-Series. Donaldson did not just stop at that: he appeared on local media, distributed flyers, had posters of PewDiePie’s face stuck on trucks and had ads running on the internet, radio and TV. The reason? The T-Series YouTube channel, introduced in 2011, was all set to overtake PewDiePie’s reign over the YouTube subscriber count, with over 71 million subscribers.

PewDiePie, whose real name is Felix Kjellberg, is a Swedish YouTuber whose video game commentary channel boasts of the largest number of subscribers. Kjellberg also uses the channel to host comedy routines and vlogs.

Felix Kjellberg aka PewDiePie

Wikimedia Commons

While not too many people beyond the South Asian sub-continent maybe aware of T-Series’ existence, the company’s videos of Bollywood song and dance routines are already the most-watched content on YouTube presently. At the time of posting, these videos had been watched around 53 billion times, beating PewDiePie’s 19 billion views.

T-Series operates 29 channels in several Indian languages, boasting of content which is not limited to just Bollywood songs and Hindi music videos, but also has a steady viewership for its fitness videos, devotional music and children’s programmes. A very filmic rags-to-riches story, T-Series was founded by Gulshan Kumar in 1983. Rising from being a fruit juice seller in Mumbai, Kumar built an empire out of devotional music and Bollywood music, following the unprecedented success of the soundtrack of the 1990 film, Ashiqui. Kumar was murdered in 1997 by members of the Mumbai underworld. His son, Bhushan Kumar, presently holds the reins to the company, amidst allegations of sexual harassment that he has denied.

While T-Series’ popularity on YouTube is definitely a signal for the ever-rising popularity for Indian music videos and songs, it also coincides with India’s boom in internet users. The estimated number of phone internet users in India amounts to about 460 million. While the price of mobile data in india has gone down considerably over the last year, one must consider the fact that T-Series has been able to remain ahead of the thousands of other YouTube channels owned by music record labels in India.

While Donaldson is planning his trip to India where he intends to buy more billboard space to popularise his hero, one is not quite sure of his motives beyond this extreme fandom for the Swedish YouTuber. He has started awarding titular rewards to members of the ‘Bro Army’, the group of people who join him in his crusade against T-Series. ‘Bros’ who are able to recruit all of their family members to subscribe to PewDiePie’s channel will be awarded the title of a ‘Private’; “Corporals” are people who will share a subscribe message on their social media; and one can become a “General” if one succeeds in getting their whole school to subscribe! He has also created a video in which he says “PewDiePie” 100,000 times, in order to “Stop T-Series in their tracks.” While these antics keep the numbers see-sawing, it is very evident that PewDiePie’s seat at the YouTube throne is wobbly and fatefully finite.

While Kjellberg has rued the victory of a big corporation like T-Series over an individual performer like him, and has decried YouTube’s capitalistic intentions, his public image too has been recently marred by allegations of anti-semitism and offensive content that includes using the N-word.